Hey, readers, and Happy Friday!

My name is Annie, and I’ll be taking over today’s newsletter. I’m a researcher for our magazine, which means I help check—alongside my fellow print researchers, Blaise, Julian, and Shreya, who are probably reading this right now, so hello—the facts that make our journalism so vital.

This morning, the Supreme Court ruled that abortion providers can continue their challenge to Texas’s Senate Bill 8, a near-total ban on abortions in the state. The ruling here is virtually inconsequential; the ban still looms large in Texas. S.B. 8, along with Dobbs v. Jackson, has shifted mass attention to the fragility of Roe v. Wade in the hands of a conservative-majority Supreme Court. But what does it really mean if the Supreme Court axes Roe, when the problem of abortion access has metastasized well beyond the right to an abortion? I liked what Molly Toth wrote in Jacobin this week: “To win a future where abortion is available on demand, for free, and without apology will require radically different tactics.… We deserve much better than Roe.”

Here in New York City (where I am), nearly one million noncitizens will be eligible to vote, thanks to City Council’s approval of a decisive bill. “If we’re going to build a city that takes care of the most vulnerable New Yorkers, then we have to give them a direct tool … to have their voices heard,” legislator Tiffany Cabán, one of the 33 councilmembers who voted in favor of the bill, told the Queens Daily Eagle ahead of the vote. This mass of new voters brings “the largest addition of eligible voters since the 26th Amendment lowered the voting age from 21 to 18 half a century ago,” John Washington wrote in The Nation, back in July.

In Congress, the Senate voted for a pathway to raise the federal debt ceiling and avert what Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer calls a “catastrophic, calamitous default.” The approved measure is the first of two steps to raise the debt ceiling, offering a one-time change to the legislative rules that allows the Democrats to vote to raise the country’s borrowing limit in a simple majority vote without Republicans having to implicate themselves. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen warned that legislators have until December 15, a quickly looming deadline, to figure out what to do about the debt ceiling or else face a first-ever default.

Speaking of history: Starbucks workers voted to unionize in Buffalo, New York, marking the first unionized store of the coffee chain’s nearly 9,000 across the United States. The union’s success marks a triumph against the corporation’s extraordinary union-busting efforts, which included a visit to Buffalo from former Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz. “This victory will go down in labor history as a turning point in the decades-long decline of unions,” a lead organizer on the Starbucks unionization campaign told Lauren Kaori Gurley at Motherboard. “It is a signal to other workers in the service sector that David can defeat Goliath.”

After years of backlash, the Metropolitan Museum of Art is removing the Sackler family’s name from its galleries, “in order to allow The Met to further its core mission,” the institution wrote in a statement. Photographer Nan Goldin, who has been staging protests in the Met since 2018, has been instrumental in galvanizing the institution to take action against the Sacklers, who have drawn no small part of their billion-dollar fortune from the misery of millions of opioid-addicted Americans. If you haven’t already, read our July/August print feature by Libby Lewis about the lawyer behind the legal push against the Sacklers.

This week has swelled with tributes to the late critic and artist Greg Tate, who passed away on Tuesday. “Tate elevated everyone—the weird, the polished, the delicate, the explosive,” Marcus J. Moore wrote in Pitchfork. Tate was a person with “unabashed embrace of the mystical and sublime,” Leah Mirakhor observed in 2018. His writing is swaggering, vicious, often contemptuous, but not without a delicacy managed only by those who believe, fiercely and adamantly, in the promise of art’s beauty, no matter its form: Public Enemy, Basquiat, Joni Mitchell, and more. When asked how he achieved the poetic bite that has left a lasting legacy on criticism, Tate said: “There’s really nothing to it. You just have to get old.”

Today at NewRepublic.com, we have Tim Noah on why the Congressional Review Act, a vestige of the Republican agenda in the 1990s, should be repealed. Kevin Mahnken writes on the deceptive popularity of Massachusetts Governor Charlie Baker. “I had a public defender come up to me once and say, ‘Thank you, judges will set lower bail if you’re in the room,’” a volunteer told Molly Osberg in her piece on Court Watch NYC. Zephyr Teachout writes on taking down tech monopolies: “We simply have to begin to use the tools we already have against the behemoths that are telling us not to.”

That’s it for me. I hope you all have a great weekend!

—Annie Geng, reporter-researcher

Every day, our journalists are exposing the right’s assaults on our democracy—and pushing the Democrats to go bold to preserve the republic. Here’s a special offer from The New Republic so you won’t miss their scoops and sharp analysis.

Yesterday’s politics question: Bob Dole, who died this week, didn’t like Newt Gingrich, and Gingrich didn’t like Dole. What did Gingrich call Dole in 1985, shortly after Dole became Senate majority leader, and how did Dole exact revenge three decades later?

Answer: Gingrich called Dole, previously chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, “the tax collector for the welfare state.” Dole got his revenge after Gingrich entered the 2012 Republican primary, by sending out a letter ripping Gingrich to shreds. “Hardly anyone who served with Newt in Congress has endorsed him,” Dole wrote, “and that fact speaks for itself.” Dole mentioned the “mounting ethics problems” that “caused [Gingrich] to resign” as House speaker, adding, “I know whereof I speak as I helped establish a line of credit of $150,000 to help Newt pay off the fine for his ethics violations.” And so on. As Timothy Noah observed in The New Republic at the time: “Former congressional leaders simply don’t talk like this about other former congressional leaders, especially ones from their own party.” “But Dole did,” Noah added yesterday, “and that’s why we always had a soft spot for him.”

Today’s politics question: Who said, in 1783, on the topic of what was then called “alien suffrage”: “The bosom of America is open to receive not only the opulent and respectable stranger, but the oppressed and persecuted of all nations and religions; whom we shall welcome to a participation of all our rights and privileges”?

Today’s bonus pop culture question: Debuting in Larry Clark’s Kids and thereafter appearing in everything from Sonic Youth music videos to fashion runways, this actress is known for eclectic roles ranging from the unassuming—a secretary in American Psycho—to the grisly—the eponymous serial killer in Lizzie. Who is she?